That was lightning in a bottle, and I don't expect that it'll happen again.
Ticketing was that area that we honed in on. We underestimated how big the market would grow.
And I'm thinking, what if he's crazy?
Will AI be net positive or net negative for society?
This is such an exciting period. We just have a very tough situation.
Some days it feels like we are all racing as fast as we can to get that next check, to get that next round closed, to get that next tool in the hands of people that is literally going to make us extinct. People see the headlines of like husband and wife, Eventbrite sold for, you know, $500 million. Yeah.
Everything that we existed for stopped happening. It was very dramatic.
What was a moment where the lines blurred between quite literally lovers and business partners?
I grew up in a small town called Santa Cruz, which is a little beach town, home of The Lost Boys,
the movie. And Jack O'Neill. And I went to college in Southern California, started working in Hollywood, and met Kevin at a wedding. My first boss at MTV married his classmate from Stanford. So, it was sort of like sheiks and geeks down the aisle, and we bridged the gap.
So, you were a TV producer?
I was in television development.
Nice. This is like a nice moment in MTV.
It was. It was the beginning of the end, I would say.
about to say that was the beginning of when I probably started to
Yeah. Yeah. So, I worked in the group that discovered Jackass. I was actually an intern when they sent their pilot in. And I got to be a part of that journey, and it was incredible. And then I went on to FX and actually was there during the beginning of John Landgraf's era, which is, you know, really just this epic era of content. When I met Kevin, it became abundantly clear that my industry as I knew it was dying. And the next era of innovation and prosper was about to happen in his industry.
You know, Julia, when I met she was at MTV and I was working on a money remittance business called Zoom, xoom.com. It's an adjunct to PayPal. We were the first developers on the PayPal API in this I say this now because it's going to be important for Eventbrite. Zoom eventually went public in 2013 and was acquired by PayPal in 2015. But, um, you know, that the company had worked out and we saw kind of PayPal, you know, this is pre-stripe as a payments platform and we were looking at what other problem areas were there. And, uh, ticketing was a fundamentally broken area. And so, you know, when I had moved to the board of Zoom, um, you know, I now had free time to go and figure this out and start something new and Julia moved up to the Bay Area. We had just gotten engaged and that's when we decided to start Eventbrite and pursue the ticketing market together.
And I'm thinking, 'What if he's crazy?' Like literally having a very delayed thought. We're already engaged. It would be very awkward.
Two years, but it'd been long distance. So, we moved in together. We started Eventbrite together. We got married and we had our first baby all within 18 months.
I had that fleeting thought of what if he's crazy and like I can definitely say he's definitely crazy, but there's like a good crazy and a bad crazy. And thankfully I found my partner in the good crazy. And that's we
No, but more you fall off onto the stuff on the good crazy. Yeah, ultimately ends in a good place, obviously.
People see the headlines of like husband and wife, like is that Eventbrite and sold for, you know, $500 million, like it's like such a great headline and story. It really is. And congrats to you both on it. But like what was a moment where the lines blurred between like quite literally lovers and business partners, where it was really difficult. And you just mentioned where it was you had a child, you started this company, you moved, like those are major life milestones.
We really very naturally embraced it having it all be a part of our lives. I mean, I think finding that shared interest and passion around live experiences, you know, Kevin came to it from an idea of how to democratize an industry just as he'd done with money transfer and really making something possible that wasn't possible before, better, faster, cheaper. Me coming to it from an idea of almost an anthropological study around how people connect and what happens when they're in these experiences. And the analogy to it being like another media format. And then our third co-founder, who we have to mention because he's such a huge part of this, Renaud Visage, our co-founding CTO, really having a passion around turning your talents and passion into profit, which came to fruition during the first financial crisis because we ran through that, as well. I think that you find this common ground and we felt incredibly fortunate to be able to build a life around that. People would always ask us, 'How do you turn it off?' And finally, I just started saying like we don't want to turn it off. It is such an advantage to be able to go home and have an idea and turn right to your co-founder and tell them that idea or to problem solve over dinner. The thing that changed for us pretty quickly was that we had our first daughter pretty early on and I think that was a huge part of what allowed us to self-regulate and balance. We just built our lives and the company in unison and I think a lot of people overthink that and sort of stress themselves out over that notion, but it was really sweet and productive and thoughtful and focused. I think the harder thing for us was when I took over as CEO and Kevin stepped back to focus on other things. That was the harder part for us because we were so used to working together for 10 years that the next 10 years of not working side by side literally. Nobody wanted to sit next to us so we'd always be seat mates, table mates in the open floor plan and that was really difficult and challenging.
But our game plan working side by side was divide and conquer sort of strategy. There are areas that I would focus on like product and areas that Julia would focus on like finance and we had very strict rules of engagement that she was always the final say in any area of finance. You know, not doing that is one of these major causes of startup death is when founders start when they haven't defined that and they start getting on top of each other and
and you know, it melts down and a company kind of dissolves.
Were there any experiences where it was just really difficult like between the two of you like truly husband and wife like man, that's
Well, I mean there were difficult experiences like COVID, you know, where Eventbrite is a live experiences company and COVID came and we were at about a $5 billion dollar GMV run rate at one instance and that went down to negative. I mean we were just one of the hardest hit and in a world where there were a lot of companies doing quite well like DoorDash took off and others but so we saw this and we hunkered down at our home office. We had screens everywhere to keep track of what was happening all around and we had to really try to help our creators through this moment because they're all effectively SMBs small businesses that were hosting live experiences and now they could host nothing.
It was sort of like having a child in the ICU during that period and it was about a 3-month really intense period of time and they were CEO at this time. I was the CEO.
a publicly traded company at this time since 2018?
Since 2018 yeah. And I think we had some knock down drag out fights then which is not emblematic of our relationship but I think that intensity really was appropriate for the time because if we didn't move and move fast and move decisively there were some really hard decisions Eventbrite wouldn't exist. I mean for all intents and purposes everything that we existed for stopped happening. It was very dramatic. We had built the company over 14 years had gotten to about 5 billion in gross ticket value and in 14 days we were doing negative revenue like sizable amounts because if you imagine practically the events that were on the platform were no longer happening and so people were asking for refunds but our creators had already paid the operational costs for the events. It was terrible. And so, in our own very intense moment, not unlike when you have a sick kid and you've got to get to the bottom of what's happening and you need to put your heads together, but it was intense, for sure.
